Application Modernization

Why Perform an Application Modernization?

Periodic modernization of your applications is crucial for ensuring optimal performance, security, maintainability, and scalability. Failure to do so regularly erodes the agility and competitiveness of your business.

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Let’s walk through the four primary reasons that might be driving your application modernization project, and the things to remember in each.

Reason #1: UX Improvement

A major benefit of application modernization is the opportunity it presents to enhance user experience (UX). Consistent attention to UX improvement is fundamental to user satisfaction, engagement, and ultimately, business competitiveness. Outdated applications erode user experience for both your internal staff and your customers, putting retention of both at risk.

Design System for Shared Components

Maintaining consistency in the visual appearance and behavior of your shared components is essential for user experience and accessibility. A good design system also supports maintainability, consistency and collaboration by centralizing design assets. ILM can help you develop a design system based on modern best practices, keeping your team efficient and productive.

State Management Strategy

Effective state management is crucial for developing scalable, maintainable, and user-friendly applications. ILM can help you choose the right state management approach based on your application’s complexity, architecture, and framework (including React, Angular, Vue).

Application Template

Are you starting a new project? Get it started properly with an application template created by ILM. We’ll provide you with a modern framework, embedded with effective patterns and best practices, tailored to the specific applications you plan to build.

Localization Addition

Do you need to adjust your user interface and content to make your products more accessible and appealing to users in different locales? We’re experts at localization, helping you expand your reach and grow into new markets by providing localized and tailored experiences for users worldwide.

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Reason #2: Legal & Regulatory Compliance

Periodic modernization of your applications is key to maintaining legal and regulatory compliance. It ensures adherence to security standards, facilitates audit trails, enhances reporting capabilities, and supports a culture of compliance within the organization. As a result, application modernization does more than help you meet your regulatory obligations — it helps you build and maintain trust with your internal and external stakeholders.

Accessibility Improvement

ILM can help you design, develop, and optimize your frontend applications and customer-facing digital products and services to ensure they are accessible and usable by individuals with disabilities. This includes making web applications, mobile apps, and other software platforms usable for people with visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, or other impairments.

Security Improvement

With today’s constantly evolving threat landscape, no organization’s security posture can remain static. Hackers, cybercriminals, and other threat actors are continuously updating their approaches and you need to as well. ILM can help you protect again threats like cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), SQL injections, and more. We can even evaluate your identity and authentication practices.

Upgrade Outdated Versions

In order to comply with new laws or regulations, the best solution is to upgrade to the newest version of your applications/systems. Let ILM help you safely and efficiently update and upgrade your applications and systems with minimal disruption. We’ll ensure your data integrity is preserved through proper backup and rollback planning, testing and validation, and security patching.

User Privacy

Regulations around user data and how it can be used are changing constantly. From Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and many jurisdictions in between, maintaining adherence to applicable laws and regulations is a challenge for every business. But respecting user privacy is more than a legal requirement, it’s an opportunity to build trust with both internal and external stakeholders. ILM can help you implement dynamic solutions that automate manual processes, improve visibility, and leverage reporting tools to more efficiently manage your company’s privacy program.

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Reason #3: Process Improvement

Continuously improving your software development processes ensures the efficiency of your development pipeline, which reduces costs and lowers the burden on your development team. It also supports improved code quality, scalability, and both end user satisfaction and employee morale — critical qualities for your business’s long-term success.

Best Practices

At ILM, we constantly update and refine our best practices — so we can help our clients improve theirs. When ILM is engaged on an application modernization project, we do more than update and upgrade your applications. We help you update your best practices — and establish a culture of continuous process improvement.

Code Cleanliness

Messy code is difficult to read, maintain, and debug. It also reduces scalability, performance, and reliability while significantly increasing risks. ILM can help you clean shop. We’ll set you up with an intuitive folder structure and reformat your code to a consistent, modern standard — improving not just syntax but structure and organization. Finally, we’ll improve your code base by automating processes for checking new code to ensure adherence to your new standards.

Code Sharing Strategy

We’re experts at helping organizations identify and implement the most effective code sharing strategy for their needs. We have vast experience with monorepo and NPM approaches, version control systems, code libraries and packages, snippets, templates, and more. Let us help you develop a strategy that improves your efficiency and time to market.

Source Control Workflow

We are experts in the use of Git, helping organizations implement and configure it for the first time, or optimize existing installations to make workflow improvements. Effective source control workflow is essential for facilitating collaboration, ensuring code quality, supporting version management, and enabling continuous integration and deployment. ILM will help you establish a workflow perfectly tailored to your culture and environment.

Testing Strategies (Unit, E2E)

ILM has deep expertise helping organizations establish consistent testing methods, from individual unit testing through complete end-to-end testing. Let us help you develop a robust strategy for integration, system, acceptance, regression, performance, security, and usability testing. We can even help you automate testing to ensure consistently high-quality outcomes.

Upgrade Outdated Versions

A stitch in time saves nine, and upgrading by one version is easier than nine version. Let ILM help you safely and efficiently update and upgrade your applications and systems with minimal disruption. We’ll ensure your data integrity is preserved through proper backup and rollback planning, testing and validation, and security patching.

Frontend

Process improvement for frontend development is crucial for achieving and maintaining high levels of user satisfaction. It also improves efficiency, productivity, and time-to-market.

Design System for Shared Components

Maintaining consistency in the visual appearance and behavior of your shared components is essential for user experience and accessibility. A good design system also supports maintainability, consistency and collaboration by centralizing design assets. ILM can help you develop a design system based on modern best practices, keeping your team efficient and productive.

Feature Flag Implementation

Our team are experts at helping organizations implement feature flags to efficiently enable or disable features or functionalities within their applications. Feature flags are an excellent way to safely roll out new features, conduct A/B testing, perform hotfixes and rollbacks, and much more. ILM can help you develop a strategy for when and how to use feature flags to reduce risk and accelerate time-to-market.

Backend

Improving your backend development processes ensures optimal performance of your applications, yielding benefits to both internal and external users.

API Strategy

Enabling seamless integration between systems, applications, and services is essential in today’s digital-first business environment, but before you dive into acquiring or creating APIs you need a strategy. Let ILM guide you on how to develop a strategy that supports your business objectives, selecting the most effective language and formats, from RESTful to GraphQL to SOAP and beyond.

Messaging Strategy

You need a solid plan and approach for communicating and exchanging data between components, modules, systems, and services within and across your applications. ILM has deep expertise with Azure Service Bus, Kafka, and other leading messaging platforms. We can help you choose the one that’s best for you and implement it effectively for optimal efficiency, maintainability, and scalability.

Data

Nothing is more important to your organization than its data. ILM helps you identify the optimal database strategy to meet your needs, and the needs of your users.

Database Strategy

A sound database strategy is vital for ensuring data integrity, storage efficiency, scalability, and performance. Our team has decades of combined experience with SQL-based databases, Mongo DB, Cosmos DB, and other leading options. We can help you select the right database for your data or migrate existing data to a new database for improved performance.

Infrastructure

Maintaining the health of your infrastructure is absolutely foundational to your organization’s success, as it provides the structural components, tools, and resources necessary for developing, deploying, and operating your applications effectively. A robust and well-managed infrastructure ensures reliability, performance, security, scalability, and cost, contributing to overall business success and user satisfaction.

Resiliency Improvement

No business can afford downtime in today’s highly competitive digital economy. We make resiliency improvements that significantly enhance the robustness, reliability, and fault tolerance of our clients’ systems. By implementing circuit breaker and retry design patterns, while establishing monitoring and alerting systems, we provide stability for applications to keep your business competitive.

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Reason #4: Organizational Improvement

Application modernization provides an ideal opportunity to build organizational skills and capacity. ILM stakes its name and reputation on mentoring client development teams during our application development and application modernization engagements. We do more than bring your applications up to date — we bring your staff’s skills there, too.

Conclusion

Periodic modernization of your applications is crucial for ensuring optimal performance, security, maintainability, and scalability. Failure to do so regularly erodes the agility and competitiveness of your business.

ILM offers a wide range of services and techniques during an Application Modernization. Our experts ensure that you get maximum value and benefit from your upgrade.

Are you ready to modernize your application?

Contact us to find out how ILM can help.